"Rhetoric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "I think if I were a professor of rhetoric I should use Dante for my text-book. Dante is the rhetorician. He is all wings, pure imagination and he writes like Euclid." James Russell Lowell told his students in answer to the question as to the best course of reading to be followed: "If I may be allowed a personal illustration, it was ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... silver; yonder shines The ocean's sapphire word; there, gray with age, The granite writes its lesson, strong and sage; And there the surf its rhythmic passage signs. The winds, that sweep the page, that interlude Its majesty with music; and the tides, That roll their thunder in, that period Its mighty rhetoric, deep and dream-imbued, Are what it seems to say, of what abides, Of what's eternal, ...
— An Ode • Madison J. Cawein
... more insidious than that lurking in five years' experience as a successful author. It had rescued her from the slough of despond when unappreciative publishers rejected her most ambitious attempts; it had come to her aid also when a southern admirer whose intentions were better than his rhetoric, sent her a manuscript ode constructed in her honor. She had won success in her profession; but she had won it at the expense of some hard knocks. But, however much the world might be awry, two people had never lost faith in her talent. ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... darned precise you are getting, Crocker! One would think you were going to write a rhetoric. What put ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... as far as possible, the verbal eccentricities of "butter blue beans" and other intricate verses of infantile memory, are scattered up and down the pages of the Port Folio, together with fresh versions of Horace and dissertations upon classical rhetoric. ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... hearty letter. I spent many hours over the few paragraphs I sent to "Nature," in trying to express what all who thoroughly knew and therefore loved Darwin, must feel in language which should be absolutely free from rhetoric or exaggeration. ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... ridicule? The Academie is above the fear of it; and as for me, a butt and a beggar as I must be, I shall have the proud satisfaction of having protected my personal honour and the dignity of history. I ask no more.' Honest Crocodilus! In the beat of his rhetoric was a sound of pure probity, which rang strangely where all around was padded with compromise and concealment. Suddenly the usher announced, 'Four o'clock, gentlemen.' Four o'clock! and they had not finished the arrangements ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... it—least of all a combative fellow like Lamennais—it would be a perpetual solitary confinement. Such a cry is merely a theatrical way of saying that he felt tired. Yet it is such sayings which impress people, because men love rhetoric." ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... sophist who taught rhetoric at Rome in the time of Hadrian. He is the author of a collection of proverbs in ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... Filium was the general title of a didactic work containing rules for medicine, husbandry, and rhetoric (e.g. 'Rem tene, verba sequentur'). Cf. Quint. iii. 1, 19, 'Romanorum primus, quantum ego quidem sciam, condidit aliqua in hanc materiam (rhetoric) ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... experimental philosopher. The task assigned to Charles Boyle was to prepare a new edition of one of the most worthless books in existence. It was a fashion, among those Greeks and Romans who cultivated rhetoric as an art, to compose epistles and harangues in the names of eminent men. Some of these counterfeits are fabricated with such exquisite taste and skill that it is the highest achievement of criticism to distinguish them from originals. Others are so feebly and rudely executed that ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... succeeded Bibracte as capital of the Aedui when Gaul was reorganized by Augustus. Under the Romans, it was a flourishing town, covering double its present extent and renowned for its schools of rhetoric. In the succeeding centuries its prosperity drew upon it the attacks of the barbarians, the Saracens and the Normans. The counts of Autun in 880 became dukes of Burgundy, and the town was the residence of the latter till 1276. It was ravaged by the English in 1379, and, in 1591, owing ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... pauses, breathing, and pitch of voice, that are very important, none of these can take the place of soul in an address. When I have an address to deliver, I like to forget all about the rules for the proper use of the English language, and all about rhetoric and that sort of thing, and I like to make the audience forget ...
— Up From Slavery: An Autobiography • Booker T. Washington
... Harold's talk with Rose, and he made the fatal mistake of concluding, from her remarks, that Eleanor had changed her mind after sending the telegram and had not come to Chicago. He therefore gave free rein to his imagination, describing in burning rhetoric how he had received her message Saturday night just as he was retiring, how he tossed impatiently on his bed all night, and rose at dawn to be at the station when the train came in. He pictured vividly his ecstasy ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... soul. Again the sentiments of Bezoni were opposed to mine. He was a believer in the dark doctrine which teaches that man is dust and that all things are forgotten in the grave. He expressed his opinions with a clearness and precision the more impressive because totally devoid of cavil and of rhetoric. I listened in silence, but with a deep and most chilling dismay. Even now I think I see the man as he sat before me, the light of the lamp falling on his high forehead and dark features; even now I think I ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... in words she made up in tears. She said less than Martha, but wept more; and tears of devout affection have a voice, a loud prevailing voice—no rhetoric like ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... which France regarded as the pledge of the most sacred union between two people, the freest upon earth." He assumed that his government was "terrible to its enemies, but generous to its allies," and prefaced his summary of alleged violations of the international compact, by a flourish of rhetoric intended to impress the ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... great historians and philosophers. Herodotus and Thucydides have never been surpassed as historians, while the Sophists who succeeded the more earnest philosophers of a previous age, gave to Athenian youth a severe intellectual training. Rhetoric, mathematics and natural history supplanted speculation, led to the practice of eloquence as an art, and gave to society polish and culture. The Sophists can not indeed be compared with those great men who preceded or succeeded them in philosophical wisdom, but their influence in educating ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... Eugene entered the sophomore class at Knox College, Galesburg, Ill., where Professor John William Burgess, who had been chosen as his guardian, held the chair of logic, rhetoric, English literature, and political science. But his career at Knox was practically a repetition of that at Williams. He chafed under the restraint of set rules and the requirement of attention to studies in ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... life and in His quiet way irons out difficulties and makes rough paths smooth. His philosophy is easily comprehended and readily applied. His words need no interpretation; they are the words of the people, the language of the masses. If He were a teacher of rhetoric He would surpass all other teachers because the art of discourse reaches its maximum in His sentences. The learned sometimes speak over the heads of their hearers, using words that are unusual and long-drawn-out. Jesus talked to the multitude and they not only understood Him but "the common ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... dimensions, a spacious theatre for lectures, &c, a library, committee-room, with a commodious residence in the front for the head master and his family. The lectures, founded by Sir Thomas Gresham, on divinity, astronomy, music, geometry, law, physics, and rhetoric, which upon the demolition of Gresham College had been delivered at the Royal Exchange from the year 1773, were after the destruction of that building by fire, in January, 1838, read in the theatre of the City of London School until ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... time-consumer for Alexander's purpose. The wily Italian listened with profound attention to the wise saws in which the excellent diplomatist revelled, and his fine eyes often filled with tears at the Doctor's rhetoric. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the Messenians and containing the sentiment that "all are by nature free''; a Eulogy of Death, in consideration of the wide extent of human sufferings; a Techne or instruction-book in the art of rhetoric; and a Fusikos lolos. Lastly, his Mouseion (a word of doubtful meaning) contained the narrative of the contest between Homer and Hesiod, two fragments of which are found in the 'Agon 'Omerou kai 'Esiodou, the work of a grammarian in the time of Hadrian. A 3rd-century papyrus (Flinders Petrie, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... vividly enough. We have surrounded Jesus Christ with a halo of mystery and of remoteness which neither lets us think of Him as being really man or really God. And I press on you this as a plain fact, no piece of pulpit rhetoric, that His relation to us as Christians hinges upon our surrender to Him. Of course, there is a love with which He pours Himself out over the unworthy and the sinful—blessed be His name!—and the more sinful and the more unworthy, the deeper the tenderness and the more yearning ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... have I listened to his accents bland, And owned the magic of his silvery voice, In all the graces which life's arts demand, Delighted by the justness of his choice. Not his the stream of lavish, fervid thought,— The rhetoric by passion's magic wrought; Not his the massive style, the lion port, Which with the granite class of mind assort; But, in a range of excellence his own, With all the charms to soft persuasion known, Amid our busy people we admire ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... present, where its elders are so obviously powerful, and no cause seems lost if it seem to threaten that power. Does cultivated youth ever really love the future, where the eye can discover no persecuted Royalty hidden among oak leaves, though from it certainly does come so much proletarian rhetoric? I was unlike others of my generation in one thing only. I am very religious, and deprived by Huxley and Tyndall, whom I detested, of the simple-minded religion of my childhood, I had made a new ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... memory too soon, and puzzle, strain, and load them with words and rules; to know grammar and rhetoric, and a strange tongue or two, that it is ten to one may never be useful to them; leaving their natural genius to mechanical and physical, or natural knowledge uncultivated and neglected; which would be of exceeding use and pleasure to them through the whole course ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... discussed in 1898-9 will be: Canons of rhetorical propriety (first half-year); the teaching of formal rhetoric in the secondary school (second ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... to the highest position in the French literary world of the age of Napoleon. In 1802, Chateaubriand published a work of still greater importance—at least, from a social point of view—"The Genius of Christianity"—which magnificent and gorgeous piece of rhetoric produced a profound change in the general attitude of Frenchmen in regard to religion, undid to some extent the destructive work of Voltaire, and was instrumental in inducing Napoleon to come to terms with the Pope. But it is on "Atala" ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... such large portions of her domain, or of the United States in stipulating for their protection. I felt the force of what Judge Grier had expressed in his opinion in the case of The United States vs. Sutherland, in the 19th of Howard, that the rhetoric which denounced the grants as enormous monopolies and princedoms might have a just influence when urged to those who had a right to give or refuse; but as the United States had bound themselves by ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham
... with a kind of rhetoric, makes speeches every time we stop. We explained to such citizens as we happened to step on that we were celebrating the dawn of our own private brand of liberty, and to please enter such inhumanities as we might commit on ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... arrangement and expression, will remain valid. If, at the outset of the career of modern languages, men had thought with the looseness of modern thought, had indulged in the haphazard slovenliness of modern logic, had popularised theology and vulgarised rhetoric, as we have seen both popularised and vulgarised since, we should indeed have been in evil case. It used to be thought clever to moralise and to felicitate mankind over the rejection of the stays, ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... readers need not be afraid that they are to be led through a labyrinth of metaphysical distinctions between wit and humour. I have read Dr. Campbell's dissertation on the difference, in his Philosophy of Rhetoric; I have read Sydney Smith's own two lectures; but I confess I am not much the wiser. Professors of rhetoric, no doubt, must have such discussions; but when you wish to be amused by the thing itself, ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... return, for I was eager to learn more of rhetoric from his lips; and in the course of our many arguments on various matters, I compelled him by most potent reasoning first to alter his former opinion on the subject of the universals, and finally to abandon it altogether. Now, ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... by supporting at least three teachers in every town of any considerable importance. They taught rhetoric and oratory and explained the works of the great writers. The Romans, who had no marked literary or artistic ability, had adopted the culture of the Greeks. This was spread abroad by the government teachers so that an educated man was pretty sure to find, even in the ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... dramatic ring in those lines; the words come straight from the heart and strike home. The swift sudden menace in the last line is more effective than pages of rhetoric. ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... quicksands rose an edifice that aped the securities of material science, developed a technical jargon and professed the discovery of "laws." Our liberation from these false presumptions through the rhetoric of Carlyle and Ruskin and the activities of the Socialists, is more apparent than real. The old edifice oppresses us still, repaired and altered by indifferent builders, underpinned in places, and ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... through page after page full of nice and subtile discrimination, without over-refinement, and of illustrations apt and luminous, yet without a touch of false brilliancy or mere smartness; which is saying a good deal, in these days of high-pressure rhetoric. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... A more wandering, blundering piece of dreary repetition never bemused an audience. In fairness to the priest, however, it must be admitted that a Government reporter is on the platform, and that the presence of that official may perhaps exercise a blighting influence on the budding flowers of rhetoric. All that the speaker—a handsome man, with a very fine voice—said, amounted to a statement, repeated over and over again with slight variations, that the people of Tiernaur were placed by the Almighty on the spot intended for them to live upon; that they were between the mountains ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... hue of every age. In 1822 love is a doctrinaire. Instead of proving love by deeds, as in times past, we have taken to argument and rhetoric and debate. Women's tactics are reduced to three shifts. In the first place, they declare that we cannot love as they love. (Coquetry! the Marquise simply threw it at me, like a challenge, this evening!) Next they grow pathetic, to appeal to our natural generosity or self-love; for does it ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... 'Rhetoric all this?' No, my brother, very singular to say, it is Fact all this. Cocker's Arithmetic is not truer. Forgotten in these days, it is old as the foundations of the Universe, and will endure till the Universe cease. It is forgotten now; and the first mention of it puckers ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... forsake. M are the Ministry whom I revile; N are the Noodles my speeches beguile. O is the Office I mean to refuse: P is the Premier—I long for his shoes. Q are the Qualms of my conscience refined; R is the Rhetoric nothing can bind, S is Herr Schliemann who loves much to walk about T ancient Troy, which I love much to talk about. U is the Union of Church and State; V are my former Views, now out of date. W is William, ...
— Sagittulae, Random Verses • E. W. Bowling
... another one, and then he himself would at last take the reins of power in hand, like a reformer who would know how to pacify the nation. As outside Socialists often declared, it was evident that the blood of a dictator flowed in that sectarian's veins. His feverish, stubborn rhetoric ended by exhausting his interrupters, who were compelled to listen to him. When he at last decided to leave the tribune, loud applause arose from a few ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... said the other, "that much as I admire your rhetoric and the rhetoric of your school, from a purely verbal point of view, such little study of you and your school in human history as I have been enabled to make has led me to—er—rather singular conclusion, which I find great difficulty in expressing, ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... Those who heard His words stood ravished. It was all as one As though Minerva, hid in Mercury's jaws, Had counselled some divinest utterance Of honeyed wisdom. So profound, so true, So meet for the occasion, and so—short. The king sat studying rhetoric as he spoke, While the lord Abbot heaved half-envious sighs And hung suspended on his accents. CLAUD. But will it pay, Horatio? HOR. Let Shylock see to that, but yet I trust He's no great loser. CLAUD. Which side went in first? HOR. We did, And scored a ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler
... then, but as woman. As regards education, she could sustain comparison with advantage; for if she had less charm of mind, she had more solidity of judgment: versed in politics, philosophy, history; rhetoric, poetry and music, besides English, her maternal tongue, she spoke and wrote to perfection Greek, Latin, French, Italian and Spanish; but while Elizabeth excelled Mary on this point, in her turn Mary was more beautiful, and above all more attractive, than her ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARY STUART—1587 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... their thoughts and passions? How wicked and shallow and feeble and foolish would Hamlet appear, if represented, not in the light of Shakespeare's imagination, but in the light of Macaulay's epigrams! How the historian would "play the dazzling fence" of his rhetoric on the indecision of the prince, his brutality to Ophelia, his cowardice, his impotence between contending motives, and the chaos of blunders and crimes in which he sinks from view! The subject would be even a better one for him than that of James II.; yet the very supposition of such ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... Rhetoric at this period was a study much followed and admired, but the logic of Saint-Louis, I suspect, was the most forcible and best calculated to remove all doubts, having a great objection to language that was what some ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... the end of a different bench, and rather stiffly sat gazing into the shadowy severity of the big room. Sounding from the front of the Court House they heard rather vaguely the deep-chested, sonorous rhetoric ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... scarcely portable, neither, if they should take the pains to export it, would it pass amongst the other Greeks, who ridiculed it so there was now no more means of purchasing foreign goods and small wares; merchants sent no shiploads into Laconian ports; no rhetoric-master, no itinerant fortune-teller, or gold or silversmith, engraver, or jeweler, set foot in a country which had no money; so that luxury, deprived little by little of that which fed and fomented it, wasted to nothing, and ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... or Gladstones - and to hear how one beardless gentleman would call another beardless gentleman his "honourable friend," and appeal "to the sense of the House," and address himself to "Mr. Speaker;" and how they would all juggle the same tricks of rhetoric as their fathers were doing in certain other debates in a certain other House. And it was curious, too, to mark the points of resemblance between the two Houses; and how the smaller one ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... Father Payne. "I gathered that he had no such intention—but he desired to investigate ours. He was full of compliments, of information, even of rhetoric. I have seldom heard a simple case stated more emphatically, or with such continuous emphasis. My mind simply reeled before it. He pursued me as a harpooner might pursue a whale. He had the whole thing out of me in no time. ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... a teacher of rhetoric, an Assyrian by birth, who was converted to Christianity by Justin Martyr, but after his death fell into heresy, leaning towards the Valentinian Gnosticism, and combining with ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... and, whether we consider the merits of the original or of the translation, the world has but little to regret in the loss. Aristaenetus is one of those weak, florid sophists, who flourished in the decline and degradation of ancient literature, and strewed their gaudy flowers of rhetoric over the dead muse of Greece. He is evidently of a much later period than Alciphron, to whom he is also very inferior in purity of diction, variety of subject, and playfulness of irony. But neither of them ever deserved to be wakened from that sleep, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... whose study of the habits and habitats of fishes gives him a kind of shrewdness of observation, just as dealing in horses is an education of certain faculties, and breeds a race of men peculiarly cunning, suspicious, wary, and wide awake, with a rhetoric of appreciation and depreciation ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... sentences of excited rhetoric. Borrow forgot while he wrote that he had a book to review—a book, moreover, issued by the publishing house which issued the periodical in which his review was to appear. And this book was a book in ten thousand—a veritable mine of information and out of the ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... shall we say?" Unattackable, Loudon will not consent to think him, though Butturlin has quite consented. "Difficult, murderous," thinks Loudon; "but possible, certain, could Butturlin but be persuaded!" And tries all his rhetoric on Butturlin: "Shame on us!" urges the ardent Loudon: "Imperial and Czarish Majesties; Kriegshofrath, Russian Senate; Vienna, Petersburg, Versailles and all the world,—what are they expecting ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... a complete course of philosophy, as that science was then understood. It dealt, in the first place, with the laws and forms of thought and knowledge, with language, in which Latin formed the basis, or with grammar and rhetoric, as also with the highest problems and most abstruse questions of physics, and comprised even a general knowledge of natural science and astronomy. A complete study of all these subjects was not merely requisite for learned theologians, but frequently ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... is a literary form invented by teachers of rhetoric for the education of students in the art of writing. It does not exist outside the world of school and college. No editor ever accepted a "theme." No "theme" was ever delivered from a rostrum, or spoken at a dinner, or bound between the covers of a book in the hope ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... use of the college. Dr. Humphreys also secured cabinets and philosophical apparatus for the college and gave instruction in Political Economy, Latin and Greek, Chemistry, Geology, Natural Philosophy, Astronomy, Composition, Elocution, Evidences of Christianity, Moral and Intellectual Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Logic. Verily, an encyclopaedic man of vast industry! Only four years after Dr. Humphreys' death the War of the Rebellion broke out, and St. John's, unlike the temple of Janus, closed its doors at the rumors of war. The buildings were used as an hospital, and not until ...
— The History Of University Education In Maryland • Bernard Christian Steiner
... life of the poorer classes, and while they can sing or paint the Roman or the military hero in conventional surroundings, they can neither sing nor paint impressively the hero who acts in those modest surroundings which they ignore. If they venture to do so, they produce a mere piece of rhetoric.(14) ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... (1764-1811) published in Berlin a Manual of the Hebrew Language (Talmud Leshon 'Ibri), planned on modern lines, a work contributing greatly toward spreading a knowledge of philology and rhetoric among the Jews. His Hebrew-German Dictionary and his Hebrew version of Ben Sira are ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... which inferred in its consequences, which of the litter should be drowned, which saved. Besides, the Laird himself delayed our young lover's departure for a considerable time, endeavouring, with long and superfluous rhetoric, to insinuate to Sir Robert Hazlewood, through the medium of his son, his own particular ideas respecting the line of a meditated turnpike road. It is greatly to the shame of our young lover's apprehension, that after the tenth reiterated account ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... chaste. His style was perspicuous, energetic, concise, and withal highly elegant. He never loaded his sentences with meretricious finery, or high-sounding, supernumerary words. When he did use the jewelry of rhetoric, he would quietly set a metaphor in his page or throw a comparison into his speech which would serve to light up with startling distinctness the colossal proportions of his argument. Of humor he had none; but his wit and sarcasm at times would ...
— Oration on the Life and Character of Henry Winter Davis • John A. J. Creswell
... rhetoric! We simply don't agree. It's happened before." Chantry laughed scornfully. "I tell you I respect him; but God Almighty wouldn't make ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... geographical, or economic. The old arrangement a humbug; as inconvenient as a fifth wheel of a coach; costs the State thousands of greenbacks every year. Figure it all up statistically and dab it over with your shiniest rhetoric and make a big thing of it every way. That's what you've got to do; that's your little biz. I'll tend to ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... next day skimmed lightly over the leader on organ-boys in their ordinary casual fashion, without even thinking what hopes and fears and doubts and terrors had gone to the making of that very commonplace bit of newspaper rhetoric. For if the truth must be told, Edie's first admiring criticism was perfectly correct, and Ernest Le Breton's leader was just for all the world exactly the same as ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... Shall. Proficiency in the use of these apparently troublesome words must be sought in text-books on grammar and rhetoric, where the subject will be found treated with a more particular attention, and at greater length, than is possible in a book of the character of this. Briefly and generally, in the first person, a mere intention is indicated by shall, ...
— Write It Right - A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults • Ambrose Bierce
... difficulty is that each of his orators is described in terms which a cool person might hesitate in applying to Demosthenes and Cicero. Mr. Magoon writes too much on the high-pressure principle. As we move down the Mississippi stream of his rhetoric, we are pleased with the rapidity of the motion, and the chivalrous feeling of the captain of the boat, but we look occasionally at the boiler and the engine with some fear ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... vegetative apparatus is the most deeply rooted core of our being. What warrant is there for the grandiloquence of the phrase: the Oldest part of the Mind? There is, indeed, room for rhetoric, even poetry, here. For all the evidence points to it as the rightful occupant of the throne upon which Shelley placed his Brownie as the Soul of the Soul. Or to put it in another way, we think and feel primarily with the vegetative apparatus, with our muscles, especially ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... clouds. There are the stars, and they who can may read them. The astronomers forever comment on and observe them. They are not exhalations like our daily colloquies and vaporous breath. What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study. The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... the bland spirit and the prime cause of his guilt is full of the energy of passion, and the rhetoric of the conversation has a masculine beauty of which Mrs. Brooks alone of all the poets of her ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... in Collier's Weekly, admits that Socialism is now a movement. But as the writer, like so many others, conceives of Socialism as having been, in its inception, a "theory," a "doctrine" promoted by "Utopian dreaming," "incendiary rhetoric," an "anti-civic jargon," he naturally views it with little real sympathy and understanding even in its present form. The same Socialism that was accused of all this narrowness is suddenly and completely transformed into a movement of such breadth ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... threw back her head and laughed scornfully. "A caballero!" she cried: "who will serenade you at two o'clock in the morning when you are dying with sleep, and lie in a hammock smoking cigaritos all day; who will roll out rhetoric by the yard, and look like an idiot when you talk common-sense to him; who is too lazy to walk across the plaza, and too proud to work, and too silly to keep the Americans from grabbing all he's got. I met a few dilapidated specimens ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... consciousness of power, masculine ability in grappling with complicated questions, and that species of eloquence, the effect of which arises rather from earnestness, straightforwardness, and elevation of sentiment, than from sparkling or elaborate rhetoric, give a man a position in the House of Commons which leaves him little in need of such other gifts as we ...
— M. P.'s in Session - From Mr. Punch's Parliamentary Portrait Gallery • Harry Furniss
... Science: A Compendium of Psychology;" "The Senses and the Intellect;" "The Emotions and the Will;" "A Manual ooof Rhetoric;" Professor of Logic in the University of ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... certainly written by one Quintus Cornificius, an older contemporary of Cicero, to whom the work was long ascribed. It, no doubt, owes its preservation to this erroneous tradition. The first two books were largely used by Cicero in his own treatise De Inventione, part of a work on the principles of rhetoric which he began ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... the advocacy of free silver and the denunciation of President Cleveland. William J. Bryan of Nebraska was then displaying in the House the oratorical accomplishments and dauntless energy of character which soon thereafter gained him the party leadership. With prolific rhetoric, he likened President Cleveland to a guardian who had squandered the estate of a confiding ward and to a trainman who opened a switch and caused a wreck, and he declared that the President in trying to inoculate the ...
— The Cleveland Era - A Chronicle of the New Order in Politics, Volume 44 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Henry Jones Ford
... arrow from a bow. While technically she is guilty; while according to the facts she is a criminal according to the motive and the intent of her actions, she is as innocent as the whitest soul among us." He could not repress the youthful Southerner's love for this little bit of rhetoric. ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... of the public mind that Milton persistently poured pamphlet after pamphlet, successive vials of apocalyptic wrath. He exhausts all the resources of rhetoric, and plays upon every note in the gamut of public feeling; that he may rouse the apathetic, confirm the wavering, dumbfound the malignant; where there was zeal, to fan it into flame; where there was opposition, to sow and ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... observations I have already had occasion to express my appreciation of the copious and perfervid eloquence which enriches the Duke of Argyll's pages. I am almost ashamed that a constitutional insensibility to the Sirenian charms of rhetoric has permitted me in wandering through these flowery meads, to be attracted, almost exclusively, to the bare places of fallacy and the stony grounds of deficient information, which are disguised, though not concealed, by these floral decorations. But, in his concluding ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... jocose vindictiveness with which Browning returns again and again to the assault of the bad grammar and worse rhetoric of Byron's once so much belauded address to the ocean is very amusing. The above is only one out of four ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... dictated the last few pages of When Valmond Came to Pontiac. It was practically my only experience of dictation of fiction. I had never been able to do it, and have not been able to do it since, and I am glad that it is so, for I should have a fear of being led into mere rhetoric. It did not, however, seem to matter with this book. It wrote itself anywhere. The proofs of the first quarter of the book were in my hands before I had ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... leaves his geology and botany, his grammar and rhetoric on the shelf when he makes his word picture. After he has expressed his thought however he may have occasion to call on the books of science, the grammar and rhetoric and these may very seriously interfere with the spontaneous product. So do the sentries posted on the ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... down Hester street and up Chrystie, and down Delancey to where he lived. And there his women folk, a bibulous mother and three dingy sisters, pounced upon him for his wages. And at his confession they shrieked and objurgated him in the pithy rhetoric of the locality. ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... and he and Reid, his factotum commander, made eloquent speeches "calculated to produce submission to the legal demands made upon them."[14] Some of the lesser captains, however, were mutinous, and treated the Governor to choice bits of Border-Ruffian rhetoric. Law and violence vibrated in uncertain balance, when Colonel Cooke, commanding the Federal troops, took the floor and cut the knot of discussion in a summary way. "I felt called upon to say some words myself," he ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... his Northern opponents was open and bold, although insolent and overbearing, and not like Hunter, Davis, and Benjamin, using ingenious sophistry and hidden sarcasm, cautiously smoothing over their real purpose, by rhetoric and elegant sentiment. Mr. Toombs became early an object of peculiar dislike to Northern men, by the rude ingenuousness with which he announced the last conclusions of his political creed, and the intolerable insolence with which, not ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... he taught geometry in the same way, and had even extended it to grammar, logic, rhetoric, and the art of composition. The rules of syntax were discovered by pieces of wood, interlocking with each other in squares, dovetails, &c., after the manner of geographical cards; and as they chanced ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... did not know well what politics meant and that he did not know where the universe ended. He felt small and weak. When would he be like the fellows in poetry and rhetoric? They had big voices and big boots and they studied trigonometry. That was very far away. First came the vacation and then the next term and then vacation again and then again another term and then again the vacation. It was like a train ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... Snake-bit Bob led in prayer, and what the old man lacked in grammar and rhetoric was fully made up for ...
— Diddie, Dumps & Tot - or, Plantation child-life • Louise-Clarke Pyrnelle
... he might be better prepared for his prolonged vigils, study, and prayers. In fine, he employed so well the short time that he spent in the religious life that I am sure that it was equivalent to a service of many years. He lectured on rhetoric in our college of Avila and was able to give instruction in theology. He fulfilled this office most satisfactorily and profitably to his students, for his intellect and erudition were very profound. On holidays and feast-days he rested by going from village to village, preaching ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XII, 1601-1604 • Edited by Blair and Robertson
... Bob led in prayer, and what the old man lacked in grammer and rhetoric was fully made up ...
— Diddie, Dumps, and Tot • Louise-Clarke Pyrnelle
... sinking-fund. This he proved by a statement of figures, and although Sheridan attempted to controvert his statements, they could not be proved fallacious. Of all men in the house, indeed, Sheridan was the most unfit to enter into financial computations, for his genius rather lay in rhetoric than in figures. In the supplies, 18,000 seamen were voted, and about 29,000 land-forces, beside those ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Language," which says: "Nonsense; shall we dignify that with a place on our list? Assuredly will vote for doing so every one who hath at all duly noticed what admirable and wise uses it can be, and often is, put to, though never before in rhetoric has it been so highly honored. How deeply does clever or quaint nonsense abide in the memory, and for how many a decade—from earliest youth ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... in Tacitus, nor the author of the Annals, the strength and sublimity of expression found in that great master of rhetoric, Cicero. The eloquence of Tacitus is grave and majestic, his language copious and florid. The language of the author of the Annals is cramped; and he maintains a dignified composure, rather than majesty; occasionally he has an inward laugh in a mood of irony, as when commending Claudius for "clemency," ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... saw a determined effort made to place a famous "right tackle" in the chair of Assistant Professor of Rhetoric. The plan was only given over with great reluctance, when it was discovered that the "right tackle" was beautifully ignorant of the subject he would have to tackle. Even then it was argued he could "cram"—keeping one lesson ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... by Min and Landis were nearest her own. She stopped there first. She found the girls busy, Landis at the study-table, putting the last touches to a composition for the following day's rhetoric. Min was sitting on a low chair by the window, sewing braid on the bottom of a dress-skirt. Unconsciously, Elizabeth gave the article in Min's hand a second glance, and recognized it as the skirt Landis generally ...
— Elizabeth Hobart at Exeter Hall • Jean K. Baird
... Greek grammar, he uniformly came down upon the father for a coat, the cloth of which was finer in proportion to the web of logic he wove during the disputation. Whenever he seated himself in the chair of rhetoric, or gave an edifying homily on prayer, with such eloquence as rendered the father's admiration altogether inexpressible, he applied for a pair of smallclothes; and if, in the excursiveness of his ...
— Going To Maynooth - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... or may not have been a gifted soldier. History is silent on the point. But the surviving records of the court-martial with which we are concerned go to show that he was certainly not a gifted speaker. His vocabulary was limited, his rhetoric clumsy, and Major Carruthers denounces his delivery as halting, his very voice dull and monotonous; also his manner, reflecting his mind on this occasion, appears to have been perfectly unimpassioned. ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... Clinch, the coolest head at a late supper,—he, the American, who had repeatedly drunk Frenchmen and Englishmen under the table—could be transformed into a sentimental, stagey idiot by a single glass of wine? He was conscious, too, of asking himself these very questions in a stilted sort of rhetoric, and with a rising brutality of anger that was new to him. And then everything swam before him, and he seemed to ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... our young hero not only lend his rhetoric, which few people care to do without a fee, but his money too (a sum which many a good man would have made fifty excuses before he would have parted with), to his friend, and procured him ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding
... the poverty of the resources upon which he depended seems almost ludicrous. Even in the vocal part of 'Alceste' he was so careful to avoid anything like the sensuous beauty of the Italian style, that sometimes he fell into the opposite extreme and wrote merely arid rhetoric. Yet he held so consistently before him his ideal of dramatic truth, that his music has survived all changes of taste and fashion, and still delights connoisseurs as fully as on the day it was produced. 'Paride ed Elena,' Gluck's ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... the blunders I unintentionally make in history, in mathematics, in names, in rhetoric, in exegesis, and yet see that God uses even blunders to save men—I sink back into the humblest place before Him and say, 'If God can use such preaching as that, blunders and mistakes like these; if He can take them ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... RHETORIC. Revised and enlarged edition. Supplementing the development of the science with exhaustive practice in composition. A course of practical lessons adapted for use in high schools, academies, and lower classes of colleges. 345 pages, ...
— Graded Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... the greatest of the novelists in the delineation of feeling and the analysis of motives. In "uncovering certain human lots, and seeing how they are woven and interwoven," some marvellous work has been done by this master in the two arts of rhetoric and fiction. ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... respect between the tendencies of different branches of knowledge; it being a sure rule that exactly in proportion as they are inferior, nugatory, or limited in scope, their power of feeding pride is greater. Thus philology, logic, rhetoric, and the other sciences of the schools, being for the most part ridiculous and trifling, have so pestilent an effect upon those who are devoted to them, that their students cannot conceive of any higher sciences than these, but fancy that all education ends in the knowledge of words: ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... outside world as the author of a number of scholarly books of essays, most of them on Roman subjects. Born at Nimes in 1823, his life has been devoted entirely to literature. Soon after his graduation from the Ecole Normale he was made professor of rhetoric at Angouleme, and later held the same position at Nimes. He has received the degree of Doctor, and occupied a number of high positions, culminating in that of professor of Latin poetry in the College de France, which he ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... tables of the rich, have in mind nothing except what will, in their opinion, be most acceptable to their audience —for in no other way can they secure their ends, save by setting snares for the ears—so it is with the teachers of rhetoric, they might be compared with the fisherman, who, unless he baits his hook with what he knows is most appetizing to the little fish, may wait all day upon some rock, without the hope ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... of his genial, ironical temperament, eminently clear brain, and undying achievements, belongs to the great poets of the ages. We to-day do not approve the timbre of his epoch: that impertinent, somewhat irritant mask, that redundant rhetoric, that occasional disdain for the metre. Yet he remains the greatest poete de l'amour, the most spontaneous, the most sincere, the most emotional singer of the tender passion that modern times ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... they are vigorous and profitable yet. Their author's unfailing capacity for saying things worth heeding and remembering is proved in every one of them. It is not easy to open either of Mr. Kebbel's volumes without lighting upon something—a string of epigrams, a polished gibe, a burst of rhetoric, an effective collocation of words—that proclaims the artist. In this connection the perorations are especially instructive, even if you consider them simply as arrangements of sonorous and suggestive words: as oratorical impressions carefully prepared, as effects of what may be ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... house finished: the part over the sitting-rooms, which you did not wish to have many gables, now slopes gracefully towards the roof of the lower colonnade. Our boy, in my absence, did not cease working with his rhetoric master. You have no reason for being anxious about his education, for you know his ability, and I see his application. Everything else I take it upon myself to guarantee, with full consciousness that I am bound ...
— Letters of Cicero • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... part of the human race plunged into a new era of myth-making and fetish worship—the homage to the fetish of law. Even the great minds do not altogether escape. 'Fact I know and law I know,' says Huxley, with a faint suggestion of sacred rhetoric. But surely we do not know law in the same sense in which we know fact. If there are no causes among our facts, then we do not know anything about the laws. If we do know laws it is because we assume causes. If, in the language ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... M. Renault, "you remind me of a college commencement. We have listened to your dissertation just as they listen to the Latin discourse of the professor of rhetoric; there are always in the audience a majority which learns nothing from it, and a minority which understands nothing of it. But every body listens patiently, on account of the sensations which are to come by and by. M. Martout and I are acquainted with Meiser's works, and those ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... him to this taste of liberty, before he began to be impatient for the return of the time when he might enjoy it. He would invite me to the garden by drumming upon my knee, and by a look of such expression as it was not possible to misinterpret. If this rhetoric did not immediately succeed, he would take the skirt of my coat between his teeth, and pull at it with all his force. Thus Puss might be said to be perfectly tamed; the shyness of his nature was done away, and on the whole it was visible, by many symptoms which I have not ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... Renaissance we find the theme reproduced by Tasso;[119] and it had doubtless been freely used by Shakspere's English predecessors and contemporaries. What he did was but to set the familiar theme to a rhetoric whose superb sonority must have left theirs tame, as it leaves Seneca's stilted in comparison. Marston did his best with it, in a play which may have been written before, though ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... eighteenth century so long as we suppose that rhetoric is artificial because it is artistic. We do not fall into this folly about any of the other arts. We talk of a man picking out notes arranged in ivory on a wooden piano "with much feeling," or of his pouring ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... of affording an adequate knowledge of the issues involved in, and the consequences of, the present great crisis in the affairs of the Jews of Russia than reams of rhetoric.—Hebrew Journal. ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... parlor Of the place of last resort, The smiler and the snarler And the guests of every sort— The elocution chap With rhetoric on tap; The mimic and the funny dog; The social sponge; the money-hog; Vulgarian and dude; And the prude; The adiposing dame With pimply face aflame; The kitten-playful virgin— Vergin' on to fifty years; The solemn-looking sturgeon Of a firm of auctioneers; The widower flirtatious; ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... can I? I am but a beginner, and to-day I feel that to sit at the feet of these dear women who have borne the heat and burden of this contest, and to learn of them is the attitude I should assume. It is not the time for argument or rhetoric. It is the time for introspection and prayer. We have come from Independence Square, where the nation is celebrating its centennial birthday of a masculine freedom. You have just heard from Mrs. Stanton the reading of Woman's Declaration of Rights; that document has already ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... which each insists upon claiming for itself. It has been held 'dangerous' to discuss questions which, though in one sense pertaining only to particular States, nevertheless bear upon the whole country. It has been considered 'heresy' to urge with rhetoric and declamation, even in our halls of Congress, certain principles for and against Slavery, for example, lest mischief result from the agitation of those topics. But in such remonstrance we have forgotten that the very principle of democratic institutions involves ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Friendship's call (thus oft, with traitorous aim, Men void of faith usurp Faith's sacred name) 80 At Friendship's call I come, by Murphy sent, Who thus by me develops his intent: But lest, transfused, the spirit should be lost, That spirit which, in storms of rhetoric toss'd, Bounces about, and flies like bottled beer, In his own words his own intentions hear. Thanks to my friends; but to vile fortunes born, No robes of fur these shoulders must adorn. Vain your applause, no aid from thence I draw; Vain all ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... gimcrack, tinsel, spangle, clinquant[obs3], pinchbeck, paste; excess of ornament &c. (vulgarity) 851; gaud, pride. [ornamentation of text] illustration, illumination, vignette. fleuron[obs3]; head piece[Fr], tail piece[Fr]; cul-de-lampe[Fr]; flowers of rhetoric &c. 577; work of art. V. ornament, embellish, enrich, decorate, adorn, bead, beautify, adonize[obs3]. smarten, furbish, polish, gild, varnish, whitewash, enamel, japan, lacquer, paint, grain. garnish, trim, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... furnishing a rich client with subtleties to confound the plainest truths, and with arguments to color the most unjustifiable pretensions. The splendid and popular class was composed of the advocates, who filled the Forum with the sound of their turgid and loquacious rhetoric. Careless of fame and of justice, they are described, for the most part, as ignorant and rapacious guides, who conducted their clients through a maze of expense, of delay, and of disappointment; from whence, after a tedious series of years, they were at length ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... morning, with what feelings it is only too easy to conjecture, that a great party, a party which, despite its many political blunders, has at least a record for honourable if mistaken statesmanship in the past, has now stooped to the final and abysmal folly. Disguise the fact with what specious rhetoric they may, the truth remains that our opponents have deliberately endeavoured to tamper with a great national possession, and to make the British Army a tool ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 8, 1914 • Various
... of expression seems yet to have been enunciated. The maxims contained in works on composition and rhetoric, are presented in an unorganized form. Standing as isolated dogmas—as empirical generalizations, they are neither so clearly apprehended, nor so much respected, as they would be were they deduced from some simple first principle. We are told that "brevity is the soul of wit." We hear ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer
... characters of Byron and Shelley, and is amusing reading. The high-flown language incrusted with the gems of rhetoric excites our risibilities, but it is not safe to laugh at Disraeli; in his most diverting aspects he has a deep sense of humor, and he who would mock at him is apt to get a whip across the face at an unguarded moment. Mr. Disraeli laughs in his sleeve at many ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... very well, and begs to be remembered in the old way to you. I used all my eloquence, all the persuasive flourishes of the hand, and heart-melting modulation of periods in my power, to urge her out to Harvieston, but all in vain. My rhetoric seems quite to have lost its effect on the lovely half of mankind. I have seen the day—but this is "a tale of other years." In my conscience I believe that my heart has been so oft on fire that it is absolutely ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... of wandering . . . this might even, through the example of the Real Unfearing, become a craze! Yes—we must refuse to be dazzled by rhetoric. These lovers also had their falling-short—they could not ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... respect for the refinements of speech or for literary polish. He could not endure Mr. Sumner's piling precedent upon precedent and quotation upon quotation, and disliked his lofty and somewhat pompous rhetoric. He used sometimes to leave his seat and make known his disgust in the cloak room, or in the rear of the desks, to visitors who happened to be in the Senate Chamber. But he was strong as a rock, true as steel, fearless and brave, ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... her tears, Bettina fixed her beautiful eyes upon mine, thinking that she could discern in them evident signs of her victory; but I surprised her much by alluding to one point which, with all her cunning, she had neglected to mention in her defence. Rhetoric makes use of nature's secrets in the same way as painters who try to imitate it: their most beautiful work is false. This young girl, whose mind had not been refined by study, aimed at being considered innocent ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... English words that went much further to allay the Risaldar's anxiety than any amount of rhetoric would have done. "But—d'you mean to tell me that the men don't understand ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... father was a man of some family. That he was at least possessed of ample means, is evident from the care and expense bestowed upon our poet's education. Under the tutorship of Anaxagoras, Prodicus, and Protagoras, he had studied both natural philosophy and rhetoric in its sophistical form. In gymnastic exercises he exhibited a successful prowess, being twice victorious in the Eleusinian and Thesean games. Of his skill in painting, some specimens were ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... contemplation of God is the best cure. How admirable Jeremy Taylor is on those points! Oh that he had not overlaid it all with such superabundant ornamentation of style and rhetoric. But it is the manner of the age. Many persons I suppose get over it, perhaps like it; but I long for the same thoughts, the same tenderness and truthfulness, and faithful searching words with a clear, simple, not unimaginative ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Northern States averages $28.07 an acre in value, and in the Southern States it is $5.34. The difference measures the robbery committed on a community of 10,000,000 by the 350,000 slave-holders. These "chevaliers of the lash" he arraigns with a rhetoric compared to which Sumner's and Phillip's words were pale. The slave-holders are worse, he declares, than thieves, for they steal from all. They are worse than common murderers, for they issue to themselves licenses to murder; the ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... must be made for what is said in the gaiety or ambition of rhetoric. We cannot suppose that any one can really mean to exclude all imitation of others. A position so wild would scarce deserve a serious answer, for it is apparent, if we were forbid to make use of the advantages which our predecessors afford us, the art would be always to begin, and ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... him professor of rhetoric at Messina, and Canisius wrote to his friends at Cologne: "As I am useless for any spiritual office I am entrusted with the insipid department of belles lettres. I teach rhetoric for which I have little aptitude, but I take pains to form these good youths, ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... expressing thought, these two generals contrasted quite as strongly as in their other characteristics. General Scott was precise in language, cultivated a style peculiarly his own; was proud of his rhetoric; not averse to speaking of himself, often in the third person, and he could bestow praise upon the person he was talking about without the least embarrassment. Taylor was not a conversationalist, but on paper he could put his meaning so plainly that there could ...
— Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete • Ulysses S. Grant
... there were also some who clearly were eminent authorities. The most illustrious were Protagoras, Gorgias, and Prodicus of Ceos. Protagoras seems to have been the most philosophical of them all, Gorgias the best orator and the chief professor of rhetoric, Prodicus the most eminent moralist and poet. Protagoras rejected all metaphysics—that is, all investigation of first causes and of the universe—and reduced all philosophy to the science of self-control with a view to happiness, ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... Macaulay, who knew his Boswell so well, could have accused him of 'speaking of foreign travel with the fierce and boisterous contempt of ignorance' would be a puzzle indeed, did we not know how often this great rhetorician was by the stream of his own mighty rhetoric swept far away from the unadorned strand of naked truth. To his unjust and insulting attack I shall content myself with opposing the following extracts which with some trouble I ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... book: The Art or crafte of Rhetoryke was originally published c. 1530; the second edition was published in 1532. It is considered the first book on rhetoric in English. ...
— The Art or Crafte of Rhetoryke • Leonard Cox
... promotion of decadence—pity persuades to extinction.... Of course, one doesn't say "extinction": one says "the other world," or "God," or "the true life," or Nirvana, salvation, blessedness.... This innocent rhetoric, from the realm of religious-ethical balderdash, appears a good deal less innocent when one reflects upon the tendency that it conceals beneath sublime words: the tendency to destroy life. Schopenhauer was hostile to life: that is why pity appeared to him as ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... of a youthful admirer. I unfortunately congratulated him on having such a pretty young gentleman to his son. He answered, sighing, that the boy had talents, but did not put them to a proper use—"Long before I attained his age (said he) I had finished my rhetoric." Captain B—, who had eaten himself black in the face, and, with the napkin under his chin, was no bad representation of Sancho Panza in the suds, with the dishclout about his neck, when the duke's scullions insisted upon shaving him; ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... A citizen of Athens, named Aristion, whose mother was an Egyptian slave, and who was the son or adopted son of one Athenion, had been sent by the Athenians as ambassador to Mithridates. He had been a schoolmaster and teacher of rhetoric, and professed the philosophy of Epicurus. He gained the ear of Mithridates, and sent home flaming accounts of the king's power, and of his intention of restoring the democracy at Athens. The Athenians sent some ships of war to bring him home from Euboea, with a present of a silver-footed litter; ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... poetry he has always returned to the naturalistic drama. Rose Bernd follows Henry of Aue, and Griselda immediately preceded The Rats. Nor is this all. The methods of naturalism have followed him into the domains of poetry and of the past. His verse is scrupulously devoid of rhetoric; the psychology of his historic plays is sober and human. Hence it is clear that an analysis of the consistent naturalism of German literature is, with whatever modifications, an analysis of Hauptmann's work ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... only to sue for the hand of the daughter of a marquis to be successful, telling him, with a sigh, that all women were not Annettes, and that upon the whole there was nothing like them. To which advice he answered, that he intended to return to rhetoric as soon as the lion fight should be over, but that he never intended to marry, having had enough of women; adding, that he was glad he had no sister, as, with the feelings which he entertained with respect ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... watchful eyes In silence, for the tongue cannot avail. Vex not his wounds with rhetoric, nor the stale Worn truths, that are but maddening mockeries To him whose grief outmasters all replies. Only watch near him gently; do but bring The piteous help of silent ministering, Watchful and tender. ...
— Among the Millet and Other Poems • Archibald Lampman
... finds not the heavens bluer and the waves more musical in maturity than in childhood. Time is a severe alembic of youthful joys, no doubt; we exhaust book after book and leave Shakespeare unopened; we grow fastidious in men and women; all the rhetoric, all the logic, we fancy we have heard before; we have seen the pictures, we have listened to the symphonies: but what has been done by all the art and literature of the world towards describing one summer ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... The rhapsode belongs to the realm of imitation and of opinion: he professes to have all knowledge, which is derived by him from Homer, just as the sophist professes to have all wisdom, which is contained in his art of rhetoric. Even more than the sophist he is incapable of appreciating the commonest logical distinctions; he cannot explain the nature of his own art; his great memory contrasts with his inability to follow the steps of the argument. And in his highest moments of inspiration ...
— Ion • Plato
... attained by it. Its subtleties and obscurities were equally inevitable. Analytical thinking takes on an analytical phraseology. It is a striking instance of a mental habit creating a vocabulary. The method of thought produces the form of rhetoric. Some of the sentences are mental landscapes. The meaning seems to be in motion on the page. It is elusive from its very subtlety. It is more our analyst than her character of Rufus Lyon, who "would ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... miraculous tongue of man? Is his head become a wretched cracked pitcher, on which you jingle to frighten crows, and makes bees hive? He fills me with terror, this two-legged rhetorical phantasm! I could long for an Oliver without rhetoric at all. I could long for a Mahomet, whose persuasive eloquence, with wild-flashing heart and scimiter, is, 'Wretched moral, give up that; or by the Eternal, thy maker and mine, I will kill thee! Thou blasphemous scandalous misbirth ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... of a man, whose support was of the utmost importance for the success of a measure which was to be submitted to a popular body that was divided in its allegiance, uncertain in its views, and therefore open to conviction by rhetoric if not by argument. It was characteristic of the past career of the young orator Lucius Crassus that he should now have thrown himself wholly on the side of Caepio and the progressive members of the senate.[1212] His past career ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... audience or the prejudices of his readers. He could play the role of the judge or the professor almost as well as that of the impassioned fanatic convinced that behind him were arrayed all the powers of Heaven. In dealing with men of education, who were not likely to be captivated by rhetoric, he could be calm and argumentative; but when he addressed himself to the masses of the people he appeared in his true character as a popular demagogue, hesitating at nothing that was likely to arouse their indignation against the Roman ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... teachers both at Rome and at Athens. Of his subsequent life nothing is known except that he held some judicial post at Rome. His work, the Noctes Atticae in twenty Books (of Book viii. only the headings of chapters are preserved), is a miscellany of information on philology, philosophy, rhetoric, history, biography, literary criticism, natural science, and antiquities. The title is due to the fact that the book was commenced in the winter evenings during the author's residence at Athens. The arrangement of the contents ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... he had need have a present wit; and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know that he doth not. Histories make men wise; poets witty; the mathematics subtle; natural philosophy deep; morals grave; logic and rhetoric able to contend." ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... In short, he came amid general execration, and departed amid universal regret. I had heard Mr. Douglas before, but never when he gave any evidence of the wonderful power which he exhibited on this occasion. With few tricks of rhetoric, with no extraordinary bursts of eloquence, he accomplished all the results of the most impassioned oratory. The qualities of a great debater—unshaken presence of mind, tact in adapting himself to his audience, the power of arranging ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the overwhelmed Mrs. Macleuchar, totally exhausted at having been so long the butt of his rhetoric, "take back your three shillings, and ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... watchman told him that he saw a man running alone, David concluded out of that circumstance, that if he came alone, he brought good news?[100] I see the grammar, the word signifies so, and is so ever accepted, good news; but I see not the logic nor the rhetoric, how David would prove or persuade that his news was good because he was alone, except a greater company might have made great impressions of danger, by imploring and importuning present supplies. Howsoever that be, I am sure that that ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne
... were some excuses for the neglect, the best perhaps being that English criticism at the time was at nearly as low an ebb as English poetry. A really acute critic could hardly have mistaken the difference between Scott's verse and the fustian or tinsel of the Della Cruscans, the frigid rhetoric of Darwin, or the drivel of Hayley. Only Southey had as yet written ballad verses with equal vigour and facility; and, I think, he had not yet published any of them. It is Scott who tells us ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... leave-taking originated among the officers and men in the field, but you hear it on all sides now, uttered with a sincerity and earnestness that is peculiarly impressive. The new style of saying "good-bye" has at least the merit of being no longer a perfunctory piece of rhetoric. ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various |
